> Microsoft villianised over the decades seems to be better than Google and Facebook.
A villian doesn't become virtuous just because someone even worse turns up.
The criticism of Microsoft a few decades ago was in relation to Apple, OS/2, BeOS, Linux/BSD/etc. and I'm pretty sure those which still exist are still less villianous than Microsoft. Note that Apple is still villianous, but rather than just extorting their users directly, they prefer to extort everyone via massive tax avoidance.
> Have you paid XX money for a service that doesn’t show ads. Are you happy with it?
I make regular payments to the Free Software Foundation, Open Rights Group, Wikimedia, etc. and am generally happy with what they do. That's not always a direct contribution to the particular software I use, but it does support some things indirectly.
In relation to Microsoft, I hear that they charge money and show ads, and I mostly hear their customers complaining about their software and services rather than praising them. For example, the centralisation of Skype for spying purposes seems to have crippled its throughput; I saw someone struggling with this recently and suggested they try meet.jit.si which turned out to give a far smoother connection (since it's P2P, like Skype used to be).
A villian doesn't become virtuous just because someone even worse turns up.
The criticism of Microsoft a few decades ago was in relation to Apple, OS/2, BeOS, Linux/BSD/etc. and I'm pretty sure those which still exist are still less villianous than Microsoft. Note that Apple is still villianous, but rather than just extorting their users directly, they prefer to extort everyone via massive tax avoidance.
> Have you paid XX money for a service that doesn’t show ads. Are you happy with it?
I make regular payments to the Free Software Foundation, Open Rights Group, Wikimedia, etc. and am generally happy with what they do. That's not always a direct contribution to the particular software I use, but it does support some things indirectly.
In relation to Microsoft, I hear that they charge money and show ads, and I mostly hear their customers complaining about their software and services rather than praising them. For example, the centralisation of Skype for spying purposes seems to have crippled its throughput; I saw someone struggling with this recently and suggested they try meet.jit.si which turned out to give a far smoother connection (since it's P2P, like Skype used to be).